this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Mozilla is adding tab grouping, vertical tabs, profile management, and local AI features to Firefox (connect.mozilla.org)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 138 points 3 months ago (5 children)

tab grouping

Sure, okay.

vertical tabs

To each their own.

profile management

Whatever, it's fine.

and local AI features

HOLLUP

[–] [email protected] 181 points 3 months ago (1 children)

We’re looking at how we can use local, on-device AI models -- i.e., more private -- to enhance your browsing experience further. One feature we’re starting with next quarter is AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities. The alt text is then processed on your device and saved locally instead of cloud services, ensuring that enhancements like these are done with your privacy in mind.

IMO if everything’s going to have AI ham fisted into it, this is probably the least shitty way to do so. With Firefox being open source, the code can also be audited to ensure they’re actually keeping their word about it being local-only.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Don't you need specific CPUs for these AI features? If so, how is this going to work on the machines that don't support it?

[–] [email protected] 60 points 3 months ago

Nope, they can use your NPU, GPU or CPU whatever you have.. the performance will vary quite a bit though. Also, the larger the model the more memory it needs to run well.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 3 months ago (1 children)

With it being local it’s probably a small and limited model. I took a couple courses on machine learning years ago (before it got rebranded as “AI”), and you’d be surprised at how well a basic image recognition model can run on the lowest-spec macbook from 2012.

[–] aBundleOfFerrets 29 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Tbh the inversion of typical intuition that is LLMs taking orders of magnitudes more memory than computer vision can mess people unfamiliar up on estimates of the hardware required

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Yeah that’s very true.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago

You only need lots of precessing power to train the models. Using the models can be done on regular hardware.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Running AI models isn't that resource intensive. Training the models is the difficult part.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

The feature will obviously just be disabled on machines that don't support it.

[–] [email protected] 92 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

While I dislike corporate ai as much as the next guy I am quite interested in open source, local models. If i can run it on my machine, with the absolute certainty that it is my llm, working for my benefit, that's pretty cool. And not feeding every miniscule detail about me to corporate.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I mean that's that thing. They're kind of black boxes so it can be hard to tell what they're doing, but yeah local hardware is the absolute minimum. I guess places like huggingface are at least working to try and apply some sort of standard measures to the LLM space at least through testing...

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I mean, as long as you can tell it's not opening up any network connections (e.g. by not giving the process network permission), it's fine.

'Course, being built into a web browser might not make that easy...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Sums up my thoughts nicely. I am by no means able to make sense of the inner workings of an llm anyway, even if I can look at its code. At best i would be able to learn how to tweak its results to my needs or maybe provide it with additional datasets over time.

I simply trust that an open source model that is able to run offline, and doesnt call home somewhere with telemetry, has been vetted for trustworthiness by far more qualified people than me.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 3 months ago

I'm not interested in AI, but if it's not touching the network, I might leave it enabled. We'll see.

All I want from Firefox is to keep up on web standards, implement security features, and improve performance. I don't particularly care about most of the rest of the browser features they throw in.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

Focus on "local". Mozilla is working since a while on that.

[–] RmDebArc_5 12 points 3 months ago

I tried one of their test builds. Seems like the AI part just means the browser can integrate with llamafile (Mozilla’s open source solution for running open source llm’s with just one file on any platform)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I wonder when tech companies are going to start calling AI something different to deal with the luddites. Like skyscrapers whose floors are labeled 12 and 14.